In Cold Blood

Unlike Dick, authorities house in a cell intended for female prisoners inside the Sheriff’s Residence, rather than in the jail itself. Undersheriff Wendell Meier and his wife Josephine currently occupy the house, and Josephine and Perry become friends over the next few months.

One day, Perry, receives a letter from Don Sullivan who served with him in Korea. Although Perry doesn’t share Don’s concern for the state of his soul, he seizes on the chance to correspond with someone.

In March, the sheriff finds and confiscates a shiv in Dick’s cell. Perry also hopes to escape, but his plans hinge on contacting two men who frequent a square outside his cell. When the men no longer appear, Perry fantasizes about killing himself.

Perry and Dick’s court-appointed attorneys persuade Dr. W. Mitchell Jones, a psychiatrist from the state hospital, to interview the men. The lawyers also unsuccessfully lobby to postpone the trial so that it would not coincide with the widely-attended Clutter estate sale.

On March 22, 1960, as jury selection commences, Perry and Smith prepare written autobiographies for Dr. Jones. Witness testimony begins the following day. The individuals who found the bodies are the first to testify, followed by the investigator who photographed the crime scene. Despite the objections of the defense attorneys, Judge Tate allows him to show the jury photos of the victims’ bodies. The day concludes with testimony from Floyd Wells.

Over the next few days, FBI laboratory technicians provide testimony regarding the case’s physical evidence. Dewey also testifies, publicly revealing two pieces of information damaging to Dick: that he intended to rape Nancy, and that sympathy for Dick’s parents motivated Perry’s attempt to alter his original confession and claim responsibility for all four murders.

The defense opens its case with testimony from Dick’s father, followed by testimony from Dr. Jones who says that in his professional opinion Dick can discern right from wrong. Although the court prohibits him from saying anything else, privately he believes Dick has a “severe character disorder” (340), and that tests should be performed to find out whether he sustained brain damage in his car accident.

Following testimony from Perry’s character witnesses—including Sullivan—Dr. Jones takes the stand again. On the matter of whether Perry knew his actions were wrong at the time of the murders, Dr. Jones has no opinion. Privately, he believes Perry shows signs of paranoid schizophrenia and that he committed the murders in a dissociative state triggered by a traumatic memory or association.

The defense team’s closing statements lean heavily on the idea that capital punishment is morally wrong. The prosecution, on the other hand, warns the jury that Dick and Perry could kill again if released on parole. After 40 minutes of deliberations, the jury convicts the men and sentences them to hang.

Perry spends the night following the trial in tears. Mrs. Meier tries to console him, but eventually must leave for a prior engagement, something that later haunts her.

At the Kansas State Penitentiary, Perry and Dick await their execution which is scheduled in six weeks. At that time, there are three other inmates on Death Row, including a man named Lowell Lee Andrews, a former college student who killed his parents and sister. Despite receiving a diagnosis of schizophrenia, Andrews is convicted as a result of the M’Naghten Rule, which limits insanity defenses to cases in which the defendant cannot understand the legal definitions of right and wrong.

The date initially selected for Perry and Dick’s execution passes while their lawyers petition for a new trial. Dick befriends Andrews, but Perry—threatened and humiliated by Andrews’ formal education—goes on a hunger strike. He grows extremely sick and only eats again when he learns his father contacted the prison to visit him.

Two years pass, and a pair of new men arrive on Death Row. George Ronald York and James Douglas Latham met in the Army and “found they shared at least one firm opinion: the world was hateful, and everybody in it would be better off dead” (373), writes Capote. They therefore went on a killing spree, murdering seven people across multiple states.

Meanwhile, Dick studies law and writes letters to various legal organizations. He convinces the Kansas State Bar Association to consider his complaints about his trial which concern the venue, the alleged biases of the judge and jury, and the alleged incompetence of the court-appointed lawyers. In a subsequent hearing, the presiding judge rules that Perry and Dick’s original trial was fair.

Andrews is executed on November 30, 1962. The other Death Row inmates are close enough to the scaffold to hear Andrews’ death. Before his execution, Andrews gives Dick a piece of paper with a stanza from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

Despite the efforts of two new attorneys, Dick and Perry are executed a few years later, on April 14, 1965. Dick dies first, followed by Perry, who apologizes for his crimes and states that he opposes capital punishment on principle.

Dewey attends the hangings, but they do not give him the closure he imagined they would. Instead, he recalls an encounter with Susan Kidwell near the Clutters’ graves a year ago. Susan told Dewey that Bobby Rupp recently married, and that she now studies art. As Dewey turned to leave, he reflected that Susan was “just such a young woman as Nancy might have been” (396).